Posts Tagged ‘Bill McKibben’

Contrasting a pursuit of public adoration with desperate attempts to create authorities who keep an issue afloat

What made Brian Williams inject himself into an Iraq war incident? Perhaps the reason is as simple as a juvenile desire to remain in the center of adoring attention. When prominent personalities in the global warming issue say things about themselves that isn’t accurate, that’s a whole other ballgame.

This isn’t about science details, either, which are subject to interpretation that’s best left to experts. But we don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a climatologist to spot faulty personal embellishments. All it takes is basic level fact-checking. (more…)

Climate activist Bill McKibben says blocking the pipeline will help curb climate change, but this is wrong on two points. First, blocking the pipeline won’t stop the oil from being used, it will just be used someplace else, such as China. Second, even if Canadian oil sands are never utilized, it won’t improve our climate, because atmospheric CO2 additions have little effect. (more…)

“Everyone knows” that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. After all, this is the advice of a multitude of health writers, not to mention authorities like Britain’s National Health Service. Healthy living now means carrying water bottles with us, sipping at all times, trying to drink our daily quota to ensure that we stay hydrated and healthy.

Indeed, often we drink without being thirsty, but that is how it should be: As the beverage maker Gatorade reminds us, “your brain may know a lot, but it doesn’t know when your body is thirsty.” Sure, drinking this much does not feel comfortable, but Powerade offers this sage counsel: “You may be able to train your gut to tolerate more fluid if you build your fluid intake gradually.” (more…)

Those of us who regard affordable energy as a golden ticket out of drudgery, as providing access to light, heat, refrigeration, and safe cooking facilities can only marvel that there still are people who consider McKibben’s perspective “a riveting fresh look” at the climate debate. (more…)

Today in the New York Times there was a story that made it completely clear why we have to be here. They uncovered the fact that the company building that tar sands pipeline was allowed to choose another company to conduct the environmental impact statement, and the company that they chose was a company was a company that did lots and lots of work for them. So, in other words, the whole thing was rigged top to bottom and that’s why the environmental impact statement said that this pipeline would cause no trouble, unlike the scientists who said if we build this pipeline it’s “game over” for the climate. We can’t let this pipeline get built. (more…)

Many of the climate theories in [McKibben’s] book [“The End of Nature.”]– and the future career path of McKibben — were shaped by James Hansen, who was then and is now the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Starting in 1988, Hansen had begun to testify before Congress that greenhouse gas emissions had begun to change familiar weather patterns on the planet and, without action to limit them, the changes would become more obvious and dangerous in the 21st century.

As Hansen explained and as McKibben later found out, the people who were most vulnerable to the flooding, famine and drought and the spread of tropical diseases lived in developing countries. McKibben was interviewing people in the slums of Bangladesh in 2006 when he was hospitalized with dengue fever, which is still untreatable. As he watched others dying, he recalled in a later book: “Something in me snapped. Nothing concrete had come from my work, or anyone else’s.”… (more…)

Referring to the video that Chris mentioned earlier, it was absolutely despicable. It is still on the web but I will not link it or embed it. The theme was alarmists in leadership exhorting their underlings (like a teacher and her schoolchildren) to take steps to reduce their carbon emissions by 10 percent. Those who didn’t raise their hands (yes, children) in favor of the program were literally blown up by their leader with the push of a button. Their blood and guts splattered those around them, as graphically as you can imagine — no, more than you can imagine. The message: climate deniers must die an extremely violent death. (more…)

Commenter Susan made me aware in my earlier blog post that 350.org’s Bill McKibben, a partner with 1010.org, has issued a statement that claimed his group had nothing to do with their gross-out, kill-the-deniers video, and called it “disgusting.” From his statement, which he issued after learning about the video after he (surprise!) climbed off a plane in Boston:

Climate skeptics are going to make a big deal of this. The video represents the kind of stupidity that really hurts our side, reinforcing in people’s minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we’re out-of-control elitists. Not to mention crazy, and also with completely misplaced sense of humor….

Those damned shriveled ears of corn. I’ve done everything I can think of, and millions of people around the world have joined us at 350.org in the most international campaign there ever was. But I just sat there thinking: It’s not enough. We didn’t do enough. I should have started earlier. People are dying already; people are sitting tonight in their small homes trying to figure out how they’re going to make the maize meal they have stretch far enough to fill the tummies of the kids sitting there waiting for dinner. And that’s with 390 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. (more…)

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago-changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more. (more…)